xXBatmanXx wrote on Dec 12, 2011, 14:13:Actually he sounds more middle eastern....playing a viking...and doesn't sound like his first language is English. Which is glaring by the vast amounts of swearing he does. Very juvenile.

oh, audio NSFW on that....

I thought he said he was Swedish in the video? I know, not exactly Viking but pretty fucking goddam close.

Congratulations you are now a badass. You will get all the titties and nipples in the world.

I didn't think I could watch that whole 8 minute video but that guy is hilarious!

Pretty awesome, and I think we can trust his advice cause it sounds like he's a real viking. Course I already put a lot of points in my smitting. Now I'm tempted to do my next playthrough using only unarmed.

Ratty wrote on Dec 1, 2011, 15:07:2. Moving service.Yes, it's super convenient but I HATE that crappy hovel in Whiterun (though it's much nicer now that I figured out how to get rid of that harpy Lydia - all that "my lord" talk, I KNOW she's just being a sarcastic bitch). I have enough septims to buy another house someplace nicer but the thought of moving ALL my heavy crap makes me ill.

Bethesda will sell this to you for the low price of $19.99. What the DLC does is activate the console and type "tgm"! Oh, and the DLC will also make all bandits attack with shovels rather than weapons.

Creston

Console commands are cheating while exploits aren't. That's my motto Then again, if I PAID Bethesda to do it for me then maybe that wouldn't be cheating.

1. Dog armor.Through enchanting I got my Ebony Bow up to 270 damage which is INSANE. One shot kills 99% of the time. And I could get it even higher if I maxed out my Smithing. Ditto my glass armor. Anyway, I gifted Faendal with his own super bow and armor and he's now a killing machine (I made a big deal of gifting it to him, but he just stood there - sheesh, a little gratitude would be nice). But poor Stray Dog feels left out. C'mon Bethesda. How about a little dog love? Eeew, that didn't sound right ...

2. Moving service.Yes, it's super convenient but I HATE that crappy hovel in Whiterun (though it's much nicer now that I figured out how to get rid of that harpy Lydia - all that "my lord" talk, I KNOW she's just being a sarcastic bitch). I have enough septims to buy another house someplace nicer but the thought of moving ALL my heavy crap makes me ill. So we need a DLC that adds a new house modification option that you can buy: moving your old crap. Yes, I know the exploit that lets you force your companion to carry way more than he's built for but I thought it'd be fun to wait around between 11 AM and 2 for the moving guys to show up, check for missing or broken items when they finish the job and spend a couple of weeks writing letters of complaint to the company demanding payment for the damage.

I played for about an hour before work this morning (5-6 AM PST - no issues). Will it do any good to play offline tonight or has the patch already been applied? Does it only patch when I restart Steam because lately I've been leaving Steam going and putting the computer in sleep mode. Haven't restarted Steam for a few days now.

It's pathetic that I'm grateful they're finally making ESC exit menus, something they never bothered to do in Oblivion. PC players are like dogs starved for attention. Any little sign and our tails wag.

Creston wrote on Nov 21, 2011, 11:17:I think if you overpower yourself in this game, it becomes boring way too quickly. If you don't go for the 100 smithing and enchanting, and don't give yourself Godly Armor of Unkillability, it remains much more of a challenge.

That's pretty hard not to do. The ONLY skills I have actively developed are Archery and Smithing. My high Stealth just came along for the ride. Didn't train or grind and it's already at 100. So if I'm only actively developing two out of eighteen skills, how could that be considered power leveling? The only alternative is to become a jack of all trades and develop a little bit of every skill but I find the rest of them boring. That's reverse grinding: actively doing boring things in the game to simply NOT develop specific skills.

In Oblivion there was a true power-leveling technique: choosing main skills you rarely used so you could level when you wanted to. In Skyrim - thankfully - that option is gone. But it's still too easy to become overpowered.

PHJF wrote on Nov 21, 2011, 01:42:Too bad magic is still so poorly done. Destruction is weak and everything else is pointless and boring. Playing a mage I couldn't kill a fucking thing until I got the archmage equipment, and even now the only reason I kill anything is because of broken-ass perk that hitstuns every enemy in the game.

My mage kicks some serious ass. Conjure an atronoch, shoot fireballs, and watch the faces melt. I also have a staff that summons a Daedric. The wards are also very useful against other casters. I use calm a lot too. Turn undead. I don't know how you find this stuff weak and pointless.

In Oblivion I was constantly developing my magic skills but just never used them. This time in Skyrim I'm not putting a thing into any magic skill. It's not an RPG, I'm-not-a-magic-user kind of thing like it is with some people, it's just experience telling me that's not the way I play.

Like Oblivion, I only use bow and arrow and I'm insanely powerful at it now. Unlike Oblivion, I find this incarnation of Alchemy boring and after playing the game picking anything and everything I came across only to store it in a chest at home, I've given up on it. With regenerating health there's less of a need for it (I have yet to use any restore health potion). Poisons don't look as fun as they did in Oblivion - fewer effects to play around with. Sad, cause I really loved Alchemy. But smithing makes up for it so overall I'm happy.

I understand what you are saying. Let me explain how I think this is working. Itís not the most refined way and thereís no rhyme or reason to why Bethesda did it this way.

Right, that's a workaround involving other equips though like I mentioned earlier. People want to just hit one button to equip two weapons that they select without needing any workaround, end of story. It would just make things far easier. They don't want to be hitting 3-4 different keys to have to do it and they don't want to have to memorize what order they did things in so that it doesn't screw up in the middle of combat while they're worried about managing shouts/magic/weapons/etc. The way Bethesda implemented it was to accommodate gamepads but having used a gamepad with the game myself just for kicks, it doesn't work very well there either IMO.

Speaking of which, anyone know if there are Control 1-9 shortcuts or something? Having just 1-8 is really limiting and my favorites menu is bloated from all of silly dragon shouts and etc.

Silly Rabbit. XBox doesn't have a control key. So of course not.

But autohotkey works very well with Skyrim. You might possibly be able to script a chain of keys to a ctrl combination. But I don't think you can script mouse scrolling so maybe not. I love autohotkey. It's made Skyrim's UI somewhat more bearable.

Verno wrote on Nov 17, 2011, 10:51:Agreed, Min/Maxing Skyrim is a quick way to end your enjoyment of it. A friend of mine powerleveled smithing and hes just stomping around the game destroying everything now.

I haven't even started the main quest or even took on any major ones and I'm pretty much at that point. Archery and Stealth are both close to 90 - haven't really developed any of the other skills yet - and had to up the difficulty to expert already. I think I'm going to crank up the difficulty to max tonight.

I've been just tracing the outside edge of the map, mining all the ore I come across and picking every plant I see. I'm going to start developing my smithing and alchemy Real Soon Now before I start any of the major quests. I'm afraid I'm sabotaging my later experience by making a super character too soon.

Silly I know, but when I came across a group of hunters leisurely taking a soak in those hot springs out in the wilderness, all relaxed, tents and a cozy fire burning nearby, a friendly greeting to me, I was sold. Or walking into an inn or general store to hear the husband and wife amiably bickering. I'm finding a lot of human touches like that. Seems they really took the complaints about wooden characters to heart this time around.

Nice not to hear the same 4 voices throughout the game too. And I swear some of the NPCs are voiced by Garrett himself, Stephen Russell.

Yeah, I did the whole Windows linking thing so I could put some games on my very small SSD and the rest on my HD. But it's so complicated and involved. I'll check this app out and finally put Skyrim on my SSD.

Having a wandering NPC to interact with would be fine, but a wandering NPC adventurer would probably make for a far more interesting opponent than a quest-giver.

Weren't there a few NPC adventurers in Oblivion? I remember seeing some random dudes exploring dungeons and not attacking me. They didn't survive very long due to the level scaling but they were there.

Maybe you're thinking of OOO. I don't believe they were in vanilla Oblivion.

CommunistHamster wrote on Nov 9, 2011, 10:30:A good procedural game would be a first (besides DF). That kind of innovation is sorely lacking in gaming today, for the last few years it's just been graphics and casualisation innovations.

I just saw this on Wired and all I can say is "Yay!" I know procedurally-generated stuff gets a bad rap but I always loved it in Arena and Daggerfall. It gives the whole game more of a feeling of expansiveness. It'll be interesting to see how it's implemented. In Daggerfall there was a certain repetitiveness to be sure: "Go to ____ and kill the ______ that has been inhabiting ______'s house." I foresee mods that will expand the developer-made templates, maybe add random quirks and twists - the great thing is the tools are now there in the game to make this possible.